Understanding locales, Introduction to locales – Sybase 12.4.2 User Manual

Page 343

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CHAPTER 9 International Languages and Character Sets

323

The equivalence of upper and lower case characters is enforced in the collation.
There are some collations where particular care may be needed when assuming
case insensitivity of identifiers.

Example

In the Turkish 857TRK collation, the lower case

i

does not have the character

I

as its upper case equivalent. Therefore, despite the case insensitivity of
identifiers, the following two statements are not equivalent in this collation:

SELECT *

FROM sysdomain

SELECT *

FROM SYSDOMAIN

Understanding locales

Both the database server and the client library recognize their language and
character set environment using a locale definition.

Introduction to locales

The application locale, or client locale, is used by the client library when
making requests to the database server, to determine the character set in which
results should be returned. If character-set translation is enabled, the database
server compares its own locale with the application locale to determine
whether character set translation is needed. Different databases on a server may
have different locale definitions.

For information on enabling character-set translation, see “Starting a database
server using character set translation” on page 348.

The locale consists of the following components:

Language

The language is a two-character string using the ISO-639

standard values: DE for German, FR for French, and so on. Both the
database server and the client have language values for their locale.

The database server uses the locale language to determine which language
library to load.

The client library uses the locale language to determine:

Which language library to load.

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